Thinking Anew

I feel like I have gone a full circle from my early days writing my blogs (or weblogs) in flat files as opposed to storing content in a database through a content management system (CMS). Prior to using Wordpress, I was heavily invested in developing with Drupal, and consider myself privileged to have used the knowledge of both platforms for work. All of sudden now, I have an urge to go back to my roots and focusing on creating blog posts without the bells and whistles.

After more than five years at the UBC James Hogg Research Centre (now also known as the Centre for Heart Lung Innovation), I am now ready to take the plunge and explore a familiar yet uncharted path. Familiar because I will continue working on a technology that I am very passionate about, though in a very different industry.

Want to get started on APEX development but don’t want to muck around with Linux too much, then this guide’s for you! As a follow-up to our second ORCLAPEX-YVR meetup on June 17, 2015, and to supplement Trent Schafer‘s excellent post on how you could build an Oracle APEX instance, here’s a simple procedure that you can use to stand up your personal APEX development environment in probably much less than 30 minutes depending on your Internet connection bandwidth!

Here’s a little weekend activity for those of you planning to attend our second ORCLAPEX-YVR meetup on June 17, 2015. To avoid network congestion during the event, please perform the following preparatory steps:

My first adventure in organizing meetups started late last year with the creation of the Vancouver Research Data Management Roundtable. The goal of the group was to gather members of both academia and industry, and engage in discussion on topics, issues and solutions in managing research data. We have since found a new home for the group. If RDM excites you, then I warmly welcome you to sign up for our mailing list kindly hosted by The University of British Columbia. Though it does help that you live around the area! We have a monthly “Data Cafe” that is co-organized with the UBC library folks.

I traditionally write a summary of what I learned and experienced at each technical conference I attend. I do this in order to help both my sponsors and I to take stock of how much value was created by attending a training event. I find this a good practice and give credit to my previous employer Nanyang Polytechnic for instilling this culture in me. This year, I decided to do this as a blog post as well and hopefully, provide others an opportunity to decide if KScope15 should be on your training calendar next year.

The much anticipated Kscope 2013 conference will be starting soon in June this year. I felt it would be befitting to share my first-time experience at this event especially with anyone still procrastinating about signing up. This is after all, what Kscope is all about - sharing knowledge!

I was very excited to receive my copy of Spring Roo in Action. This is a fairly recent MEAP offering from Manning and is scheduled to be ready by the end of this year (2011). A 500-page quick-start guide, and IMHO, the missing manual for anyone interested in learning agile and rapid prototyping using Spring Roo.